Navigating Solutions and Darkness

“But sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a person who is in the process of changing.” -           Dalinar Kholin, Oathbringer (Stormlight Archive #3) by Brandon Sanderson Imagine if you will, the scene of the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken. Two roads, diverging in a yellow wood. Now imagine a signpost pointing towards the road less travelled, saying “Take this road, ya morons.” And imagine that the other road is well paved and lined with lush grass, wish shops and stops and the promise of beautiful sights along the way. And the person that just finished putting up the sign picks up his toolkit and walks away – along the road more travelled. What do you do, as a young seventeen or eighteen year old, unexposed to the world, shoulders heavy with the weight of your own insecurities? This was how it felt, to be a student in my former university. Now, I am a literal person. If a signboard tells me to go one way, I go t...

"Hey, gorgeous girl," he texts in reply to my "Hi." It's never just a "Hey," never just "Sup?", it's always an embellished, over the top message that seems to bathe me in glorious comfort... for about half a second. And it's not that he's a bad person. Everything about him - the way he speaks to me, the way he acts around me - it's all overly lavish, like he's found someone special, and needs to be sure to tell them so. But I've gotten very  good at reading people over the years, or so it seems. At least when I'm not willfully blinding myself to somebody's faults and assuring myself that they would never   do that -- (happened once,  folks, it won't happen again.) So I asked myself what made me uncomfortable about being showered in praise about my looks and the way I made someone feel. Ultimately, it wasn't that much of a puzzler. If you were to ask him who I am, he'd be able to tell you tha...

Talking about an underage girl who kept having sex-chats with strangers on the internet, and coming to the conclusion that what she was basically looking for was validation - a context that immediately placed her actions in a far more understandable light. Ahh, validation, the very bane of my existence. Saw a tweet today that said that the best thing you could do to help someone with borderline personality disorder is to give them validation, and yeah, I relate to that hard. To me, it feels like a thing that costs nothing to give out, but which seems to be withheld anyway. And then, when it's withheld, I read that action as being spiteful - because what does it cost someone to just say that, yes, my feelings are valid, my reading of the situation is valid. But, hey, everybody has their own reasons, and most people probably feel as trapped by their emotional makeup as I do by mine, so the healthiest thing to do is cut losses. If only cutting losses were so simple. When you...

I wrote this to submit to a Pain Poetry contest but I didn't end up doing that because why do things that intimidate you when you can just indulge in maladaptive daydreaming, right?